Oracle OBIEE Review

The most valuable features of OBIEE for me are the graphs and reporting that it provides. I would like to see end users have the option to customize more themselves.

Valuable Features:

The most valuable features of OBIEE for me are definitely the graphs and reporting that it provides. The data it displays look really great and they're easily customized.

Improvements to My Organization:

Sales people have a different kind of mindset and they want to see different varieties of reports. If somebody wants to see data by store, or by store in a particular ad, and their district managers want to see something with the region specifically, OBIEE can provide them that detailed data. Also, through BI Answers, we can get data that's time-specific, holiday-specific, weekday-specific, or weekend-specific. We can easily configure and manage pretty much any metric we want across our retail business.

Room for Improvement:

Some of the main disadvantages of Oracle would be they don't give the whole privilege for the end user to customize the way they want. Some things can only be done by an admin or a business analyst, and then really only someone familiar with OBIEE would be able to do it. But unlike other product, like Domo or Tableau, irrespective of the database, you can write run-time reports by an end user. The interface is going to take care of it and, depending on the variables that they change, they would get the data. Data remains the same, but you are giving more to the end user to handle.

Deployment Issues:

We have no issues with deployment.

Stability Issues:

Scalability Issues:

It has a Repository Creation Utility that has its own schema. It's on a production database so when you clone them, they're going to come with the same schemas where you won't be able to run those well for the test database. You'll need to export or import so that before the clone you drop and recreate the whole BI suite.

Initial Setup:

Setting it up or even upgrading it is definitely not for someone within the first year of their career. You really need to to be experienced and to know a lot of things, such as integration, how it behaves, its parts, and a million other things before you start to get the hang of it.

Implementation Team:

We implemented it ourselves with our in-house team.

Other Solutions Considered:

I did a demo with Domo, but those guys were right behind me for more than a year. We didn't have any plans with Tableau, but it may be a solution that we could eventually migrate to.

Other Advice:

I wouldn't recommend it as there are many other product out there, as long as your database is covered with RDBMS or other warehousing database. If you're freshly implementing, there is no reason in going with a 90's-style solution in 2016.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.